The so-called mindlessness of violence: violence as a pathological variant of aggression

This article proposes that violence may be most usefully thought about as a psychological rather than a behavioural phenomenon. Violence, it is contended, is a pathological variant of aggression, where ‘aggression’ is used to describe a particular part of the range of affective endowments possessed by human beings. We might think about aggression as a ‘set’ of which violence is a subset. As an affective endowment, aggression requires integration during development and this is supplied initially by an infant's primary carers and later by other important objects and institutions in the environment and culture in which the growing child lives. In the absence of the required conditions for enabling psychological integration to take place, rather than integration, disintegration holds sway with the aggressive affects denied or dissociated from. In this instance the affects do not become part of the affective repertoire upon which the individual can draw in order to orientate him or herself to their environment and in particular objects in the environment. Instead the affect is experienced as exterior and other and in some circumstances as violating. In this circumstances violence is resorted to as a way of escaping from the experience of overwhelming affects, for example by evoking in another affective experiences that cannot be tolerated within the self. Clinical case material is used to illustrate this.